Biotech Architecture

Biotech-Architecture

What is Biotech architecture?

  • Biotech architecture is not a style. It is a computer-centred process of architectural design, production and use.
  • Biotech architecture combines global technologies with local responses to site and social conditions.
  • Biotech architecture is information-based, not form-based. It does not prescribe what a building should look like, but how it should behave. Bio-tech architecture uses smart technologies to achieve a dynamic, interactive relationship between a building, its users and the environment. In the near future, smart materials will be used to help achieve the same result.
  • Biotech architecture aims for customized design from the molecular level to the rooftop!
  • Biotech architecture is self-organizing. It is not a fixed or final product, but is more like a biological organism which continuously learns about itself and its surroundings, adapting to changing conditions and improving its own performance.
  • Diversity is as important to Bio-Tech architecture as bio-diversity is to nature.
  • Biotech architectural design is a total design approach with continuous feedback from the production process to the design process and vice versa.
  • Biotech architectural design is multi-disciplinary and network-based. It involves co-ordinating a number of simultaneous dialogues with different people in different locations using complementary skills, covering all aspects of design, production and use, including clients and future users wherever possible.
  • The heart of the Bio-Tech design process is the virtual prototype, which is both a design and communications medium. Used together with rapid prototyping and associated virtual reality technologies, Bio-Tech architecture actively encourages full and open participation in design.
  • Biotech architecture demands radical changes in education and practice!

From: 'Networking the studio: architectural education and the virtual practice'. Environments by Design, Winter 1997/98, pp. 81-82.